Here’s a clip… well, that’s a well -known phrase in the film and Hollywood -style scene. You can take a piece from a movie or TV show and talk about it in relation to the rest of the show, the rest of the media industry, and society as a whole. You can dissect the scene or scenes picked out to analyze and talk it up regarding behavior, scenery, dress of the participants/ costumes, the setting, anything that one can use to categorize what people say and do in the world of entertainment.

The same applies to the world of professional sports.

In this case we talk about a few seconds’ clip of a conversation from NBA team owner Donald Sterling, wherein he makes an extreme racist comment regarding bringing “black” players to parties. Considering such players make up most of the National Basketball Association, Mr. Sterling really put his foot… well, feet, in it when he said that. Now his wife wants to retain her ownership of the Clippers, but she had just as much a part in supporting such behavior as Mr. Sterling, so both need to be removed from any further involvement with the NBA.

Meanwhile, what can the fans or supporters of the NBA do? We can talk with our pocketbooks for one thing! We do not have to support the spoiled brat owners and overpaid players and CEOs of the NBA. There are better things most of us can do with our money. And there are better examples we can set for our families. No one in Los Angeles has to support the Clippers; there are other things you can do with your time and money if you are so inclined. You can leave off going to the games all together for one thing. Just stop, cease and desist, terminate your financial support for the NBA.

Spend time with your spouse, your kids, your extended family. Go on a great vacation and have fun away from the talk and chat and mental trash and karmic garbage of the cities and the mass media. Imagine the vacation you could extend with the equivalent of the price of a season ticket to some boring game! You can spend time at home with your family – just hunker down in the quiet privacy of the house, with a fun family time of pizza, a movie, soda, popcorn, fun foods and drinks and gathering on the couch to bond. Forget professional sports; become a professional at having a good time with family and friends. Use the money you would spend on tickets and buy some really great food and serve a fine dinner at home to your family, friends or colleagues. Dress the table with candles, your best plates and flatware and napkins and some flowers, put on some mood music and have a party.

Or if you have wanted to take up a hobby you can use that money to try something in the arts world. Try photography; let your creative talents shine instead of watching a few guys on a wooden floor run up and down trying to put a rubber ball into a network basket for a few minutes at a time, with their loud and cruddy mouths and their bad attitudes up and down constantly on your squawk box with the blaring pixelated screen. Spend the ticket money on a nice DSLR with a great set of lenses and take off on a weekend vacation to try it out. Try your hand at painting or drawing or landscaping.

Of course you can always set the world of the celebrity and the media aside, turn everything off and go outside to do something for your community. Participate in a cleanup day; plant a garden, clean up the trash, mow a neighbor’s lawn, repair a deck or driveway. Paint your house… paint an elderly neighbor’s house. Wash the car, walk the dog of a sick friend. Take a war veteran to the movies. Treat yourself to a movie if you are a vet and know that your efforts paved the way for others in that theater to enjoy that show. Be proud of your output, no matter what you do to contribute to helping your community. Know that you are doing something for others, not supporting a group of spoiled and hyped multi -millionaires on some sweaty basketball court.

You can do more with your time and money… you just have to find out what interests you and try it out.

We have been taught, very much programmed, to think on the run, to be rushed and hurried, to anticipate and to expect… and somehow, to stress out.

Then there are the methods people have come up with to reduce the stress that we seem to expect from daily life. There are spiritual practices, which for Buddhists are part of daily life, and there are drugs, and there is yoga, and there are massages, and there are exercises, and there are those who say “tune it out and just get on with things”.

What else is there? Answer the question: What causes “stress” in the first place for many people? Stress seems to be the result of what happens when expectations do not measure up with results; then our minds spend hours analyzing, thinking, chewing on what went wrong (more often than what went right), and losing sleep and losing our appetites because we expected or anticipated one result and another one showed up.

What can we do then that might reduce our dependence on short -term coping methods such as drugs by the expensive dose –load, or massages that temporarily flush our bodies of pain and suffering and lactic acid?

We can learn to take life naturally, and not place such a high, “set in stone” priority on expecting or anticipating. For daily life can be seen rather as a baseball game.

In baseball, every at bat is different, every inning and every game will be different. Your team can play the same team three days in a row and the results will be attained in different ways. You might have the same line –ups, but the pitchers will not be the same and the weather conditions will not be the same. The ball will carry differently depending on the winds; the turf will be different, the plays will be fielded differently.

The managers can “expect” a play to go a certain way but what if it does not? What happens then – stress. The pitcher wanted a strike called but the umpire called the pitch a ball; so much for the strikeout. A batter wants to launch a home run but instead gets under the ball and hits a long out. Well, the hit might advance a runner or it might be the third out of the inning.

As is baseball, so is life. We might go to the same bus stop we do each weekday for our trip in to the shop. We might get there about the same time each day but the bus might be late by a few minutes due to construction, a fire, or a crash that causes a reroute. When we get to work we might expect some colleague to show up but perhaps they do not, so part of the day’s plan might not be done, or lunches might be cut short because the staff has fewer people.

Some people say it is not good to lower expectations, but considering the effects stress has on the body, not setting so much on expecting something might be the best thing we can do save for treat ourselves when we have done something good at the office or had a very successful week or done some kind of community service. It is useless to anticipate what will happen; anticipation is the companion of worry, and worry does no good.

We can also learn to “mind less”. When we mind too much, we continue thinking about every little thing that happens, every person that comes and goes, every gesture, everything, and getting the small stuff too much in our minds causes just as much worry as anticipation and expectation. We can indeed have “too much on our minds”. In this age of too much information, we have to learn to do more than merely “tune out” what is not relevant or important. We have to change our thinking on not only how much information we need and is necessary, but on those who say we need to pay so much attention to the information provided. Thank goodness for the mute button and the OFF switch.

Each day presents opportunities to be fresh and new regarding what will happen. You have heard the idea of “open mind”; that is basically another way of saying “Be natural”. Let things happen as they will; if the bus comes a couple minutes late, it comes a couple minutes late. If someone does not show up on time or at all, arrange lunches with the staff members that show up. It is polite, if you happen to be late because of a transit situation, to tell someone why you were late or what happened, and get to your position as soon as possible so the day can carry on.

Do not let your job run you; YOU control your work and your interactions with customers. You say who is next and attend to the person you are assisting. Patience on all sides is a virtue, but you have the hand when in a sales situation. You might expect something to happen but if it does not, that energy is wasted in the anticipation of selling something, seeing someone, hearing something or experiencing something. Here is where the idea of the open mind is useful. Once you are at the workplace, ascertain things when you arrive. Do not anticipate ANYTHING; plans can change on a moment’s notice and situations can pop up.

There could be a storm, a building evacuation, a car crashing into the building, a fire or a swarm of bees that lands on the bridge near where you work. The boss could be in a great mood or he could be in a foul mood. The vice –president could be ready with her plan or she might put it off because there has been an event in her family that requires her attention away from the company. Though you cannot anticipate happenings such as those above or know what to do in such cases until someone else informs you, there can be some kind of “Plan B” at the firm for when someone cannot follow through with what is supposed to be on the day’s agenda.

You can find something else to do- there is always work to be done at many businesses. You can find ways to be helpful or find something to learn. Or if things just aren’t going to go as the day’s schedule mandated, you might just go back home. Who knows? If that swarm of bees hangs around you might just have to “telecommute”!

Anticipation, expectation, and worry are three little demons that afflict many people around the world and are major sources of “stress”. But each day brings chances to start with a clean slate, to meet the day free of thoughts of “what might happen”. Each day brings the bridges, but you will not know how to cross the bridges till you come to them.

You come up to the bridge and look at the situation. What is going on? Is the bridge intact and thus can be walked across with ease on sturdy supports? Is there a flood that has washed out the bridge so that it cannot be passed? What are the conditions? You cannot know until you see the situation and find out how then to deal with it.

The recent disasters of this year could be turned into a song, a poem, a newscast, and they have been in name and number rolling off the tongues of reporters and residents since the Boston Marathon bombing and its after -effects.

There were the terrible fires in California with the extremely dry conditions there; there was the wayward officer who had parts of California on edge for days, and now nature has taken over yet again.

Well, I have one thing to say to the celebrities of our nation: GET UP AND START DOING YOUR PART NOW! What do I mean exactly? It is this: the hard -working people of these cities and towns have paid good money to see your shows and your movies, millions of dollars paid in to see these events. Your kids then can go to posh and super -uber private schools, be dressed in expensive clothes and shoes by nannies and supervised in the breakfast room by British butlers. Now your kids can have the very best, so shouldn’t the people who have supported your elaborate lifestyles expect something from you?

I do not mean putting on the music shows for the benefit of you getting some photo opportunity or your name in the paparazzi press and top headlines in the magazines. Why not just get out there and contribute by putting in some elbow grease and telling the camera people and your agents to leave the celebrity stuff behind for once. Act like the ordinary citizens you really are anyway, and put on the cleanup gear. Get out the leather gloves and the jeans, the heavy boots and the hats, the plain shirts and the water bottles and the sack lunches and get alongside those who are right now searching the rubble of Moore, Cleburne, and Granbury and other parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and maybe now even parts of Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee. Severe weather also moved through Illinois and Missouri and Iowa.

So you celebrities and American royalty who are not making your presence known, go ahead and take the chance. Put aside the glitz, bling, glimmer and shine of the stage, the fancy clothes, the designer gowns and the lights and the pricey jewelry. Get right alongside the folks who have supported your careers by buying the magazines, the CDs, the DVDs, the music videos, the ring tones and the designer lines of sheets, clothes, shoes and furnishings for the home and office.

Get in there! Get into the soup kitchens and make cauldrons of soup, pans of bread, saucepans of vegetables, sandwiches for the first responders, and bowls of Jello and pudding for the kids. Go into the hospitals and help the chaplains; go in and pray for the survivors, and go to the bedsides of the children to bring them stuffed animals, books, art supplies or other toys.

The people are out there and you should be too if you have the time and energy. Bring your hands out there; there are people who need all the help the nation can give right now. There are lives to rebuild, homes to reconstruct, communities to bring back to life, wounds to heal and lives to reconnect.

In the Northern Hemisphere we can see some stunning celestial objects; we can witness meteor showers and fantastic bolides and we can see rings around the sun and moon, which are caused by light reflecting from cirrus clouds (made of ice crystals). We can see planets, stars, and arms of our home galaxy; depending on our lighting and pollution conditions we can see dim stars, star colors, the Milky Way and the nearest galaxy to our own, Andromeda.

As children if we are fortunate we have telescopes and excellent binoculars with which to see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the features on our Moon, and with proper filter protection, solar prominences and sunspots. We can pick out some of the better known constellations and asterisms, such as Orion and the Summer Triangle.

However, many of the sights people can witness in the celestial realm are seen only in the Southern Hemisphere. Certain supernovae for instance have been seen only from that part of the Earth, and some of the best dark skies in the world are in that hemisphere.

Wouldn’t it be great if the nations of the Southern Hemisphere engaged in eco-friendly peacetime deals and stopped their wars based on religion and grabbing power, in tearing down the forests and destroying the land? There is so much to marvel at and ponder if only the people of Indonesia, India, Africa and South America would lay down their weapons and quell their anger and just take time to gaze into the skies on clear nights.

What would they see? They certainly would see sights on a grand scale, such as we can see here if we are lucky.

Americans are learning the benefits of having regions devoted to dark-sky observation, freed from development and away from the lights of big cities and industry. We know that reducing the amount of artificial light that enters our windows at night is beneficial for our health, but we still need street lights that are designed and efficient enough to direct light down instead of up and out. Better lighting would reduce greatly the amount of that awful “light pollution” that clouds the skies even dozens of miles away from cities.

Thus in areas with fewer cities and developments, such as are seen in some parts of the Southern Hemisphere, just think of the benefits the peoples could draw in by catering to people who want to see wonderful dark-sky conditions. Eco-tourism is growing in popularity, and there would be nothing better for some overworked city dweller to come to a quiet, dark, calm place, and get out there under the sparkling show of a velvety black panorama.

There would be globular clusters, galaxies, planets, stars, meteor showers, the spiral arms of our Milky Way; there would be constellations and comets to grace the eyes and the brains of astute viewers. What a place to hold a Messier Marathon an area such as India, Micronesia, Australia, Indonesia, and Easter Island would be!

What else would the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere see? Branch out for a moment from talk of the skies and the planets and think about what they would see in others and in themselves. They would see other human beings just as they are, they would see families and young children yearning for a chance to have peace and quiet and grow up in a place free from constant noise and lights for security and weapons discharging and waste ruining the streets and the atmosphere. They would see people yearning for freedom to enjoy nights in the countryside with their relatives; they would see people wanting time on their front porches to watch the meteors or watch the progression of the planets as their ancestors did centuries ago.

They would see more than a resource for bringing in serious bucks and for preserving their natural environments; they would see each other.

Galaxies in our own right are we humans; with so many parts but within each individual, within each person there are opportunities, there are chances and there is potential. We are stardust each one of us; we are made of the universal elements born in supernovae. Our common beginning is up there and around us, in the cosmos, in the evolving universe, and in the stars our destiny is happening every second.

We can take notice of each other and with clear heads we can look up and help others do the same. Take the time, turn off the lights, go outside, be quiet, relax and breathe, and just look up.

THEY THOUGHT….

Poor Hadiya. Poor young girl with so much potential… poor friends who huddled with her in the park just for shelter.

Mourn the reasoning for “gang turf” and “gang territory” that the news folks make so much out of in Chicago reporting these days. We certainly don’t need the mass media touting that at every turn, that “crossing gang lines” that only gives the gangs more attention and more focus. Mourn that those youth were in “the wrong place at the wrong time”.

And now on News Radio 780 WBBM we have Police Superintendent McCarthy of the CPD coming on and telling us that the young men arrested and charged with the murder of that aspiring and wonderful angelic young lady thought they were encountering members of a rival gang and so opened fire without another thought on the group, killing Hadiya. He says they thought they were seeing other gang members.

They thought. THEY THOUGHT? What in the world does he mean “THEY THOUGHT”? They thought, nothing. My five feet “they thought”.

THEY THOUGHT? IDIOTS! BULLIES! THUGS! DAMNABLE FOOLS!

Had they been thinking, well first they would not have been out there with those guns firing wildly into a group of kids just huddling in a park. Mistaken identity… some thinking they did. They thought, eh? They did no such thing, they were NOT thinking of anything but doing WHAT THEY WANTED.

That’s the way with such people, they do what they want with no consideration for others. And one of them should not even have been out on the streets, much less in possession of a firearm with which to terrorize others. And it is terrorism, folks, it is homeland terrorism, this business of gangs. They are homeland terrorists!

Some now say that the way to conquer this behavior begins with background checks. OH NO, FOLKS, not at all. It begins long before some sort of background check. It begins before someone can learn to spell “firearm” or learn what one is. If there are guns in the house, that should be part of what the parents teach the children, and it begins with being dutifully responsible for teaching that child what those instruments are for.

The way to a better society begins with everyone taking PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for their actions when they are of an age for normal, logical reasoning of right and wrong, good and bad, basic morals and actions and considerations and the principles of good citizenship. When someone is able to understand these aspects of living in a society then it is time to test what the child has learned in the way of being responsible for what he does and what he does to others, and learning how to act when someone does something to him.

When your child is of an age to understand that something will hurt someone else, or that “this is a good thing to do”, or that “you are not to use this unless it is for…”, then you start them out on the path to being a good citizen. You teach trustworthiness, accountability, honesty, respect for others, and in time, community service. That should be the goal of our education system in this nation.

They thought, hm. Well, our politicians are not doing much thinking either. They sure are doing a lot of talking and sitting around “looking into things”. But doing talking and sitting do not address the issues like ACTION does. We don’t have time for the politicians doing their thing to keep on wasting time and money and energy.

We have to act, we have to govern ourselves and our communities; we cannot wait for the elected officials to get busy on that. Government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” So we as good citizens have to do the acting and the governing. You are not in control of the gangs – that is what the gang folks want you to think. But the gangs are nothing but cowards… they are armed cowards and they are bad, unfeeling, inconsiderate people, and that makes them dangerous. They are desperate for something, be it material gain, drugs, satisfying a habit attributable to greed or materialism or to get attention they otherwise miss somehow.

Gangs do not control you or me or us, they do not control the parks, schools, “neighborhoods”, street corners and stores. The upstanding people like Hadiya and her family and her nice friends are the ones who have the real control and who pay the taxes and who want to live and play in a better place. They want to learn and to work and to be good citizens; they do not want to be like those murderous thugs and fools who want to muscle in and terrorize others.

Do not stand for such behavior any longer. Come out of the woodwork, find out who these people are and what they are doing, what they want and why they are around. Move them out by force if you have to. Turn them in, SNITCH ALREADY! You might save a life.